Saturday, March 30, 2013

Originally from Vancouver, Gillian Savigny has spent the last twelve years studying and working in cities across Canada. She holds a B.A. Honours degree in English Literature from Queen’s University and an M.A. degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University. She has served as Editor for ultraviolet Magazine, Managing Editor for Delirium Press, and Contributing Editor for Matrix. From 2007 to 2008 she worked as a speechwriter for the Leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. Her first collection of poetry, entitled Notebook M, was published by Insomniac Press in 2012. She lives in Toronto where she works in the non-profit sector.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Before my first book, I felt like I couldn’t think of writing poetry as anything more than a personal hobby—something I did alone in my spare time. Now I feel more a part of a community of other writers and more willing to set aside other pursuits in order to focus on writing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have a short attention span and writing fiction, even short fiction, seems like a pursuit that requires both the ability to multi-task and the ability to sustain concentration over a long period of time. For someone who is easily distracted that seems like trying to juggle while balancing something on your head. Plus the elements of writing that I most enjoy are the language, imagery, turns of phrase—less so character and plot.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It varies from poem to poem, but I have found that once everyone’s finally out on the page I’m often a lot happier with the poems that came quickly than I am with the ones that took their time. I guess because they can still surprise me, whereas I know all the painful secrets of the slow ones.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Writing usually begins with an idea that for whatever reason catches my attention and makes me want to tease it out in different ways. It’s usually something that I can’t resolve after a single poem, that I want to go back to and explore but using a different approach or form or conceit and so I guess in that sense I’m writing a book from the beginning, but the book shifts as the poems take shape. When I was starting the project that would eventually become Notebook M I wanted to write generally about the scientific sensibility. It took awhile for the Darwin poems to emerge and for his writing to become a kind of frame for the whole book. In the book, those early poems appear toward the end, making it seem as though the Darwin voice is fading, being replaced by a more modern and general scientific sensibility when in fact the opposite happened as I was writing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
So far readings haven’t been a big part of my creative process. When I was writing Notebook M, I spent a lot of time thinking about the page as an environment and about how poems have adapted to the page. Notebooks, like journals, are books that aren’t really meant for public consumption so I wanted to explore what elements could be built into a poem that would keep it on the page and make it difficult to adapt into a performance. That said, I do enjoy readings. I find them nerve wracking, but it’s always exciting to share your work with an audience and see how they react to it.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Aside from thinking about poems as adapting to different environments and the content of poems adapting to different poetic forms, when I was writing Notebook M, I spent a lot of time thinking about whether writing poetry is a process of making or collecting. The word ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek word that means “to make” and I think many poets think of themselves as “makers” that is creators, people who bring things into existence out of the thin air of individual experience. But that idea makes me kind of uncomfortable. It feels bound up with monotheistic worldviews where the poet is cast as a God-like figure. In a book about science and Darwin I wanted to question that conception of the poet and try to figure out what could replace it and this idea of the poet as collector—of writing as a process of bringing together found objects either to show contrast or affinity—seemed like it might be a workable alternative.7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I don’t know what the role of the writer should be, particularly the role of poets. The average person probably thinks of the poet the way they might think of a broach—as being a totally superfluous adornment. I don’t know if I could put together a case that would convince them otherwise, but I find it oddly comforting to think of the William Carlos Williams line: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. I think everyone can benefit from a good editor who understands what you are trying to accomplish and can help you achieve it in a way that will clarify your intentions for your audience. Working with Sachiko Murakami on Notebook M was a wonderful experience. She helped me give all my darlings a good death and made a much better book in the process.9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
This isn’t the best piece of advice I’ve ever received, but it is my favourite: write with a pen that makes you feel good. It sounds totally trivial, but it reminds me that writing should be enjoyable. And while many parts of the writing process are out of your control, the pen you choose to use definitely isn’t.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I haven’t really done much moving yet, but I hope to do some experimenting in the near future. I’m interested in how form influences thought expression so in that sense it is appealing to think about exploring narrative forms.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My writing routine has typically been as follows: do a lot of thinking about writing, research things I’m interested in, wait until I can arrange some kind of deadline that is out of my control, then let the deadline pressure crystallize my thinking on the page. I would love to be the kind of writer who has a daily routine. I have tried many times to get myself into this kind of routine, but I think I’m doomed to be daydreamy, erratic and last minute.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Walking helps. I find moving sometimes makes it easier to think. It also helps to open a book I’ve never read before. I don’t find going back to books I’ve already read helpful. I need to move forward, find something new. So perhaps the best thing would be to walk to a bookstore to buy a new book. I’ll have to try that the next time I hit a wall.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I don’t have very distinct smell associations with home—though for some reason I do with my late grandma’s house in Medicine Hat: pink lemonade, garden fresh stewed tomatoes, Hawaiian tropics sunscreen—but I do have strong sound associations. I grew up on the west coast where it felt like it would rain non-stop from the beginning of November to the end of February. I live in Toronto now, but I find I sleep better when it rains through the night. For the same reason, I have an unusually high tolerance for the squawking of seagulls and crows.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Science is a big one.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Change a tire. Build a cabin. Visit the Galapagos.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Evolutionary biologist. Psychiatrist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is challenging, but the effort feels worthwhile. Also, I always found other writers to be such interesting, thoughtful, funny people and continuing to write seemed like a good way to stay in their company.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished reading Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño. I admire the subtlety of his storytelling and how gracefully he resists tidy resolution. For the film, I’ll choose Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols. It tells the story of a father and husband experiencing the symptoms of schizophrenia for the first time and the impact that has on his family. I admired how the director intertwined realism and delusion.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m in the very early stages of a new poetry project. It’s one that will allow me to keep thinking about collecting—in this case hoarding or the pathology of collecting and what that means when the thing collected is alive and wild.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Arielle
Greenberg was raised in Niskayuna, New York, home of the first Shaker community
in America and eight and a half miles from where Mother Ann Lee is currently
buried. She was pregnant with her second child when she conducted the research
for this book in the summer of 2007 at the Shaker Heritage Society in Colonie,
New York and at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine,
home to the only living Shakers left in the world (four at the time of
Arielle’s visit, including a recently arrived young novitiate). She tried to
keep this pregnancy a secret from her mother, from whom she was estranged, but
her mother found out about the pregnancy in early November 2007, when Arielle
had just entered her third trimester. Arielle began having nightmares and
visions of the pregnancy being cursed, and about two weeks later, the baby died
in utero at thirty-one weeks. He was named Day, and was born and buried in
Maine in December of 2007. (More of the story of his birth and death can be
found in Arielle’s book with Rachel Zucker, Home/Birth:
A Polemic.) (“ABOUT THE AUTHOR”)

I don’t often
begin with such biographical detail, but the new edition of American poet Arielle Greenberg’s chapbook Shake Her
(Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) appears to require it. Originally produced as part of the 2008 dusie kollektiv, Shake Her is a startling, heartbreaking and complex collection of
poems. Constructed as a scrapbook of poem-sketches and footnotes as part of
ongoing studies into the American Shakers, Greenberg’s Shake Her feels very much part of a much larger frame than the
boundaries of the immediate publication. At roughly thirty pages, this is a
book that ties the narrator as mother to her own mother to the historical figure
of Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), founder of the American Shakers. Through the
narrative of the poems, the connection is one that binds the three throughout,
eventually moving into the loss of Greenberg’s second child. In one of the
first poems, she writes: “I’d be stupid to pretend there wasn’t all that
sky-writing / when I was a child and you were my mother.” (“SKY-WRITING”), and
the loss of her mother (“to California, and to illness physical, and to illness
mental, and to general anger,” as she writes in the poem “THIS IS WHERE I CAME
TO KISS (ALBANY, NY)” ) is deeply felt .

FORGOTTEN

My mother has a lovely face of fur, I once wrote,

and has to go to a meeting.

As in a
fairytale, there’s a hole in my book where a mother should be,

a hole in my
head, caught in my throat,

a hole in my
fine felt heart worn on a fob.

There’s a
hole big enough to push my finger through

and flex to
feel the flood of air I am damming.

This hole
die-cut in my life and peered out

to an
illuminated page with a castle and a rook,

this round,
voided space, my mother.

The hole that
hills yell through.

If I followed
the familiar paths—was orphaned,

taken to the
wolves or the witches or left in spindled knots—

well, as in
I am living the good life without,

The author of
two trade poetry collections, My Kafka Century(Action Books, 2005) [see my review of such here] and Given
(Verse, 2002) [see my review of such here] and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials
(New Michigan, 2003), as well as the co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of the
hybrid genre nonfiction book Home/Birth: A Poemic (1913 Press, 2011), Greenberg has written numerous poems on
mothering and motherhood, and her work compares with some of the rare best of a
genre that far too often falls into sentiment and cliché. This short chapbook
is stunning, and works, in part, to highlight how long it has been since a
trade collection of her poetry appeared. Shake
Her feels like something much larger that we haven’t yet been able to see,
whether still in-progress or left waiting, unfinished. I want to see what the
rest of this looks like.

THIS IS WHERE I CAME TO KISS (ALBANY, NY)

Some Hints of a Religious Scheme, Taught and
propagated by a Number of Europeans, living in a Place called Nisqueunia, in
the State of New-York, Valentine Rathburn (Salem, 1783): “They begin by
sitting down and shaking their heads in a violent manner; turning their heads
half round…their eyes being shut.”

I walk the
ground for once a childless mother. The thistle, clover, wind and bug-sticky
heat are all what I communed from when I was young. The roosters look like
perfect folk paintings of roosters, almost kitsch, almost sacred. It is as if
the present tense were itself trembling.

Around the
corner, the small airport where I used to come to kiss, when I was a virgin and
my boyfriend had a hatchback and we both lived at home with our families. It is
as if the tide of my next child is already breaking, did break, will break,
because waves are just a thing the water does again and again.

I think of
myself as a person who, if no path is clearly marked, simply will not start
walking. But here I walk, because I am a mother with no child with me. A mother
enveloping a secret next child. A child with no mother, with a mother who will
not walk beside me. Simple is a
fallacy.

A big bee
bumbled by from the pages of a children’s book I read to my daughter last night
at bedtime. I could sleep or die or birth here, out in the open, in this
forsaken and holy farm, its medicinal herb garden still tended, made to look
new by volunteers. I could be, finally, that orphan, a free spirit, and bound
only to this plot of star flower, Indian cup, and ghosts.

Except, of
course, that I was raised up here, daughter to a mother now departed (to
California, and to illness physical, and to illness mental, and to general
anger). Except, of course, that this is where I came to kiss.

______

I want to go to my Mother; I am sick to see my
Mother; I had no God till I had a mother; how could I be born without a Mother?
What reason I have to bless God for my mother.

Toronto
ON:Toronto poet Mat Laporte has been producing increasingly interesting work over
the past year or two, the result of which is the chapbook Billboards from Hell (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2012), currently enjoying
a second printing. Billboards from Hell
is Laporte’s second chapbook, after Demons
(Ferno House, 2010). What intrigues, in part, is the range of structures
Laporte attempts throughout the short collection of poems, really stretching
out the possibilities of the work. Not all the poems achieve what they attempt,
but when they do, they strike perfectly, such as this poem, with a title
borrowed from W.G. Sebald:

The Rings of Saturn

I fear I maybe put too much stake in books

What is loneliness but the mind’s estrangement

from the chest? Breaking loose from sheer inertia

and the capital of youth is angst. It is Canada Day.

The mall is closed. Is everybody with me? A bridge

through the physical world is taken with frequent stops

for snacks. It has been a beautiful dream. Though

the body is open to contemplation, it is, in a sense

excluded. Nothing beats a cohesive statement

As in a theatre, the actors appear

to complete the great catastrophe of this piece.

You are an uprising in yourself.

jwcurry once told me that bpNichol wasn’t a
great poet because everything he did worked, but that he was willing to fail,
and there is something to be admired by any writer constantly willing to
stretch out their own skills. Laporte is willing to stretch out and attempt,
and there is a great satisfaction to seeing just how clearly and openly his
poems attempt, from list poems to short lyrics to the pared-down sequence of
the title poem. Not everything might work, but sometimes one can achieve
magnificent things that couldn’t have been possible otherwise, an aesthetic
openness Laporte shares with Ottawa poets Amanda Earl and Pearl Pirie. I am
enjoying these poems, and am very interested to see where Mat Laporte’s writing
continues to go.

Judgement Day

The day is a dog without skin

There is a constant kick in the ceiling

Red stool, black book, grey cup, red stone

Potlights or portholes into oblivion

I could stare at this monkey for millions

Watching him dance is like

The most beautiful expression of

I will never love you, signed, the Truth

As if naked hysterical guacamole

I’m sweating hot dogs on the floor

DJ Unidentified Flying Organ vs. DJ Ball-Shaped Head

The State is an illegible tank

Each day plows instead of no-head

Nowhere. Buckets of mitochondria,

Prehistoric man, and the whole shipful of meaning

Pulling in to Main St. Station

We shouldn’t even sleep

We should all just scream all the time

Windsor
ON:
Produced for a reading Dennis Cooley did in Windsor in March, 2012 is every tuesday (Wrinkle Press, 2012),
produced by Nicole Markotić’s Wrinkle Press (see their relatively new website here). The stretch of the three pages make it difficult to tell for certain if
the chapbook is made up of a single poem composed out of small fragments, or
three distinct pages, part of an ongoing tweak of Cooley’s to not title certain
of his pieces. The poem begins with the title, writing: “every tuesday / also thursday
every thursday too / and sometimes wed / nesdays hang // my heart in the window
/ my shadow on the snow[.]” Cooley’s poem (or poems) jam, enjamb and twist, rife
with puns and slips that make one groan as much as breathless, turning lines on
coins far smaller than a dime. As in much of Cooley’s writing, every piece ties
into structures far larger than they could ever appear, stretching far wider
and deeper than even the consideration of the trade volume, which makes me
wonder what this fragment might eventually be part of.